How to find the employee with the second highest salary?

Question

Is there any predefined function or method available to get the second highest salary from an employee table?

Answer 1

In Oracle you would use a query such as this one to return paged results (rows M to N):

SELECT NAME, salary
  FROM (SELECT NAME, salary, ROWNUM r 
          FROM (SELECT NAME, salary 
                  FROM employee 
                 ORDER BY salary DESC
                )
         WHERE ROWNUM <= :N
        )
 WHERE r >= :M

Alternatively, you can use analytics:

SELECT NAME, salary
  FROM (SELECT NAME, salary, row_number() over (ORDER BY salary DESC) n 
          FROM employee)
 WHERE n BETWEEN :M AND :N